Meanwhile…

Last updated on: December 31, 2014 at 1:35 pm by Mark Shea

Meanwhile… 2014-12-31T13:35:29-07:00 Mark Shea

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…as the duopoly fleeces you, the pagan predators in the corporate world figure out ways to reduce you to what used to be serfdom but is now called “the disposable worker”:

Wary Companies Rely on Temps, Part-Timers, Hire Overseas

Over the past 10 years:

• The U.S. economy’s output of goods and services has expanded 19%.

• Nonfinancial corporate profits have risen 85%.

• The labor force has grown by 10.1 million.

• But the number of private-sector jobs has fallen by nearly two million.

• And the percentage of American adults at work has dropped to 58.2%, a low not seen since 1983.

What’s wrong with the American job engine? As United Technologies Corp. (NYSE: UTX – News) Chief Financial Officer Greg Hayes put it recently: “Sales have come back, but people have not.”

That’s largely because the economy is growing much too slowly to absorb the available work force, and industries that usually hire early in a recovery—construction and small businesses—were crippled by the credit bust.

[More from WSJ.com: CEOs Say Don’t Expect Much Hiring]

Then there’s the confidence factor. If employers were sure they could sell more, they would hire more. If they were less uncertain about everything from the durability of the recovery to the details of regulation, they would be more inclined to step up their hiring.

Something else is going on, too, a phenomenon that predates the recession and has persisted through it: Changes in the way the job market works and how employers view labor.

Executives call it “structural cost reduction” or “flexibility.” Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon calls it the rise of “the disposable worker,” shorthand for a push by businesses to cut labor costs wherever they can, to an almost unprecedented degree.

Capitalism, like democracy, only works in a Christian society, because Christianity puts pressure on capitalists and reminds them that there are higher matters than the bottom line, such as the human dignity of the worker. Get rid of a Christian culture and you get a system of predator/prey relationships, like the one re-emerging now as pagan values of mere power take over. The notion “all men are created equal” is a piece of pure mystical dogma handed down from the Christian tradition. Reject that tradition, and there is not a reason in the world for a wealthy and powerful person to think that disposable serfs possess any dignity that should impose on his bottom line.

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